The 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results Are In
We’ve been working hard for months, and today the Developer Survey results for 2019 are live. This year marks the ninth year we’ve published our annual Developer Survey, and nearly 90,000 developers took the 20-minute survey earlier this year. See the results for yourself! What are some of this year’s key results? Python, the fastest-growing…
Julia Silge
Data Scientist (former)
We’ve been working hard for months, and today the Developer Survey results for 2019 are live. This year marks the ninth year we’ve published our annual Developer Survey, and nearly 90,000 developers took the 20-minute survey earlier this year.
Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey of people who code around the world, but our results don’t represent everyone in the developer community evenly. We have further work to do to make Stack Overflow the welcoming, inclusive, and diverse platform we want it to be, and this is reflected in our survey sample. We are committed to building on steps we’ve taken in the past year and improving in this area this year and beyond. Some of these survey results directly guide those efforts.
To address these characteristics of our survey sample, we often summarize results by country or gender, highlight results for underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, or use survey weighting to correct for demographic skew. Be sure to check out where we’ve pointed out these kinds of differences.
We’ll make the anonymized results of this year’s survey publicly available under the Open Database License (ODbL) in May. Until then, you can access the data sets from previous years. Have questions or feedback? Head over to Meta and use the
See the results for yourself!
What are some of this year’s key results?
- Python, the fastest-growing major programming language, has risen in the ranks of programming languages in our survey yet again, edging out Java this year and standing as the second most loved language (behind Rust).
- Over half of respondents had written their first line of code by the time they were sixteen, although this experience varies by country and by gender.
- We asked respondents to think about the last time they solved coding problems with and without our site. The data indicates that Stack Overflow saves a developer 30 to 90 minutes of time per week!
Stack Overflow’s annual Developer Survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey of people who code around the world, but our results don’t represent everyone in the developer community evenly. We have further work to do to make Stack Overflow the welcoming, inclusive, and diverse platform we want it to be, and this is reflected in our survey sample. We are committed to building on steps we’ve taken in the past year and improving in this area this year and beyond. Some of these survey results directly guide those efforts.
To address these characteristics of our survey sample, we often summarize results by country or gender, highlight results for underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, or use survey weighting to correct for demographic skew. Be sure to check out where we’ve pointed out these kinds of differences.
We’ll make the anonymized results of this year’s survey publicly available under the Open Database License (ODbL) in May. Until then, you can access the data sets from previous years. Have questions or feedback? Head over to Meta and use the
[survey-2019] tag.
19 Comments
The 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey
“We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly.”
I don’t consider the possibility that the survey respondents are above average incredible. There are many possible explanations for this: the one that comes to mind fastest is the self-selection bias.
“We asked respondents to think about the last time they solved coding problems with and without our site. The data indicates that Stack Overflow saves a developer 30 to 90 minutes of time per week!” I don’t think answers to that survey question alone can establish that fact; the survey answers are self-reported, and the phrasing of the question created a vague metric based on a hypothetical comparison. Survey questions like this probably say more about how much time people *feel* they have saved than how much actual time has been saved.
While it’s undeniable that Stack Overflow has become a go-to place for answers to programming questions, and it is likely popular because obtaining answers here is more efficient than searching through random forums, a survey question lacks the strength to establish the claimed result, and thus the “30 to 90 minutes” figure amounts to mere marketing.
You’re right. It’s more like it built my entire career.
Agreed
“Python, the fastest-growing major programming language, has risen in the ranks of programming languages in our survey yet again, edging out Java this year and standing as the second most loved language (behind Rust).”
I can’t understand why Java is still used so much…
Large enterprises are simply not likely to change their application platforms for the “next shiny thing that comes along”. There has to be some really compelling advantages for them to make the switch.
Despite whatever personal dislikes you may have with regards to Java, it has proven itself to be a stable, and it scales really well, something that is critical for enterprise applications. Also since it’s inception Java was built with web application development in mind.
The recent advent of Spring and more recently Spring Boot have shown that Java is ideally suited to provide REST web service endpoints. This has allowed front-end developers to be free use whatever framework or library that best suites their needs.
In México its very used …
I’m half way through my first year at university and I too can’t understand why Java is still in use so much.
Unfortunately, asking other recent graduates from other universities they too had to basically do 3 years of Java. I think this is a shocking legacy issue where the lecturers only really know Java, therefore that’s what they’ll teach.
The problem here is that University then becomes a bit of a Java factory pumping out newbie software engineers into the industry with only Java knowledge albeit, a good general understanding of OOP, but it’s such a shame it’s been focused on such an archaic language instead of something more modern, like perhaps C#…
Is it possible to find out how many of the 2.6% who said they have autism are in full time employment?
Is it possible to find out how many of the 2.6% who said they have autism are in full time employment? As only 1% of the world population are autistic and only 16% of them are employed full time in the UK, this would suggest software development is a very good choice of industry for autistic people.
Wow Phytons
I bet it saves us way more than 90 minutes a week. Sometimes, it has saved me a whole week.
Next time, consider asking how people feel about working in an open-office space, a cubicle, or a private office (perhaps shared by one or two others).
I was a little surprised to see no mention of Julia in your 2019 survey results. Does that mean it falls below all the mentioned languages in usage? Well, I did a search for new posts in the last month for some of the lesser languages in the survey (using “created:1m”). Here are the numbers:
Swift: 8,689
Kotlin: 3,179
R: 25,070
VBA: 5,001
Objective-C: 1,264
Scala: 2,342
Rust: 587
Dart: 1,921
Elixir: 262
Clojure: 208
Web Assembly: 64
Erlang: 123
Julia 314
Julia comes in ahead of Elixir, Clojure, WebAssembly, and Erlang, though is certainly at the low end. That may just mean that Julia users don’t need as much help as R users, but regardless, I think the numbers warrants including Julia in your next survey.
I have found the post very useful and informative.
Its a part of the “we love the 90s” movement. They go full retro programming Java on their Pentium processors. They really make those mhz count!
I shared this with my software development service and they found this article to be informative and a must share on other platforms. Keep up the good work.
Hi! Great survey. When do you plan to publish the survey for the year 2020? I am super curious what your insights will be for this year 🙂